Leaving Normal: JG Ballard 1930-2009

There was a time when a lot of the works (musical, lyrical and beyond) by “punks” were pretty much informed, influenced or even “rehashed” from literature or the ideas presented by books, poems, architecture, art movements etc.

You see, punk rock was pretty “arty” and intellectual back in the day, just like its fore-fathers Velvet Underground. Bands and artists like Television, The Voidoids, Patti Smith, Pere Ubu and more from the nascent “punk” beginnings around New York then were mostly educated misfits who mined from Bukowski, Kerouac, Burroughs and French bad-boys Artaud, Rimbaud, Verlaine etc.

The Sex Pistols was at one time associated with the Situationists, even though it was just the influence brought in by the band’s stylist Jamie Reid and manager McLaren. Even The Ramones was tagged with playing with absurdist, minimalist cheekiness; suggesting that the “brudders” were influenced not only by pop-ditties of the 50s but also the Dadaists.

Later bands who became progenitors of post-punk, from Siouxsie & The Banshees, The Cure, Bauhaus etc, mined and extolled new mindscapes from absurdist, depressing writers like Camus. Birthday Party wailed a lot of Brecht. The Gang of Four with their take on Marxism and Joy Division twitched with Ballard.

Just like Brecht with his enduring “Brechtian” characteristic, Ballard birthed “Ballardian”; i.e. “dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes and the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments” (according to Wikipedia that is).

Joy Division dragged this into our consciousness via their song “Atrocity Exhibition”, Grace Jones reaffirmed with her cover of The Normals’ “Warm Leatherette” and Tubeway Army rendered everything soulless Ballard-style with “Are Friends Electric?” (not before Bowie’s own “Heroes”, of course).

And of course, there are many more examples where punks or ex-punks spitting high-brow literature via rough rock’n’roll upon impressionable kids everywhere throughout the ages, but I believe it all died out suddenly when it all became a “pose”, and when the likes of Sham 69, The Angelic Upstarts et al came around spouting class consciousness; rejecting all this art-school intellectual “bullshit” for a slice of “real” life on the streets. And before long this return to working-class, everyday-people “realism” inevitably slid into its own mindless pose and moronic emptiness.

I’m in mourning, not so much for Ballard, but for the general lack of lessons learned and inspiration gleaned from such scribes in our collective creative juices presently. And I blame it solely on our continuing submission to the seriously toothless, dumbed-down agents of the current stream of popular culture products bombarding us.

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